Just over a month ago, Ed Smylie died. You hadn’t heard of him? Me neither. But if you have ever watched Apollo 13, you will know his character. He was the guy who emptied a box of apparent junk (including duct tape) onto a desk, held up a square canister and said “we have got to make this fit into the hole made for this (holding up a round canister) using nothing but this” pointing to the pile of junk

.From quite a humble background, and following service in the US Navy, he had taken degrees in Engineering and Management. By the time of Apollo 13 he was Chief of Crew Systems at NASA. With a crippled space craft, 200,000 miles from Earth and hurtling in the wrong direction, death must have seemed an absolute certainty to Jim Lovell and crew; “Houston, we have a problem” remains one of the all-time great understatements!

A critically urgent challenge was purging the carbon dioxide exhaled by the astronauts. They had sufficient oxygen, but if the CO2 had built up they would have lost mental faculty and asphyxiated. The Command Module had no power to use the square canisters, and the Lunar Module “lifeboat” didn’t have enough round canisters for the slingshot journey around the Moon and back to Earth.

Ed Smylie had to solve the problem, and fast. He asked for a list of the miscellaneous items the astronauts had onboard. And when he saw duct tape on the list his reflection was “I felt like we were home free. One thing a southern boy will never say is:‘ I don’t think duct tape will fix it’ “.

He and his colleagues worked all night, radioed up the design, and the carbon dioxide levels dropped immediately.

Jim Lovell (the calmest most competent man ever?) and Flight Director Gene Kranz( “failure is not an option”) are the names we remember, but never forget the critical role of the support players like Ed Smylie, who allowed success to be snatched from the jaws of catastrophe.

Everyone can play a footnote in history.

So, what’s the relevance? In the UK we can’t build a railway on time and to budget. Or we spend 16 years and £1.2 billion (120,000 hip replacements) arguing about a tunnel under the Thames, before a single shovel has gone in to the ground. And shamefully, in Wales we have given up on infrastructure development all together.

Meanwhile, two Labour Ministers (Bridget Phillipson and Wes Streeting) suggest that our children need to cultivate “grit” to counter the mental health epidemic that seems to bedriving school absenteeism and leading to disability during working life. Mind you, they have come in for some stick from those on the left who seem determined to attribute every problem to a lack of (non-existent) Government money.

When President Kennedy said “We choose to go to the Moon…and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard” he drove American aspiration. He also openly challenged school children to prepare themselves to become tomorrow’s leaders. Despite being on the left of US politics, he realised the importance of individuals grasping opportunity and working hard to be their best; to make their lives and their families and their country better. He understood the balance between individual responsibility and the role of the state.

Those haranguing the need for more “grit” highlight a 14 per cent neuro-divergent rate in schoolchildren. 14 per cent of our kids can’t be abnormal; the truth is they/we are all on a spectrum. Let’s stop deluding ourselves that they are ill and start educating them so they can be their best.

Time Magazine called Ed Smylie an “improvisational genius”. Nowadays we would probably label him autistic. And as our Resident Doctors demand another unaffordable pay rise, that looks likely to lead more widespread public sector industrial action, maybe it’s time to remember another great JFK quote; “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”.